Uh, so this is maybe a weird post to put up after not writing anything for a while, but here I am.

I’m a big fan of the Awesome window manager. It’s definitely not for everyone, but I switched to it a while ago and have really become a fan of how it works. I don’t even use most of its features, honestly, but I like that they’re there. And I really appreciate that you can change almost any aspect of how it works. One weakness of it, though, is that it isn’t very well-documented. You kind of have to dig into the internals to figure out how things work, or get lucky and find some internet rando’s blog post telling you how to do the thing you want to do.

In this blog post, I, internet rando, will tell you about one Awesome customization I’ve done, to give each tag (workspace) button a different color.

A picture of a cool bar!

(By the way, these instructions are written for Awesome 4.2. You might be able to follow along for other versions, though.)

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Hi, blog! Been a while, huh? I’ve been busy lately. I’ve been working on a lot of stuff, but haven’t really been posting about it here, because I keep abandoning stuff before I feel like it’s ready to show the world. Well, no longer! Here is a new thing I’ve been working on this past week. I call it Donut Simulator, but that name isn’t really super descriptive. It’s a little population simulator; it randomly spawns a bunch of little circles with brains and they have to try to figure out how to eat food and reproduce. It’s cute and it’s been preventing me from getting actual stuff done because I keep staring at it, which I think is probably a good sign for a project.

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Oh man, what?!

Apr 13, 2016 in meta

I have been operating under the assumption for several months now (since about August) that my static-site-generator-blog-thing was broken as a consequence of switching back to Linux on my new computer, and that I therefore couldn’t post anything on it, and that I didn’t have enough time to figure out what was wrong with it, since I had tried to fix it before, but it hadn’t worked. I don’t really remember the exact problem that I was encountering anyway. Today, I decided to try to fix up the ol’ blog and maybe actually post something on it. Imagine my surprise when I found that… it’s actually completely fine. So, I guess look forward to seeing some new content here finally! Rejoice!

Syntax

Jul 21, 2015 in programming, thoughts

I want to talk about programming language syntax tradeoffs. This stuff has probably been said before, but I’ve been thinking about it a bit recently and want to write a blog post about it, because what’s this blog even for anyway.

I was thinking about people’s complaints about various programming languages, and it got me thinking about tradeoffs of features vs. syntax simplicity. What do I mean? Let’s look at some examples.

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Deep Dreaming

Jul 14, 2015 in computers, photos

So I may have become a little bit obsessed with Google’s new Deep Dream hallucination algorithm. As I understand it, they use their image-recognition algorithm and make it enhance the features that it thinks it sees. Then, they run the new image back through the algorithm several more times, so that those features become amplified even more. However, the features that it thinks it sees tend not to correspond to actual features of the image, leading to hilarious/terrifying results.

Google has set up a repository for it on Github, but I couldn’t figure out how to set it up. So I thought that was the end of it. Until! I found out that there is a website that will process images for you! This was a very exciting development, so of course I had to go process some of my own pictures.

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